They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do.
But they didn’t, because they realized they didn’t have to. It’s 100% possible to put pirated games on the Switch - in fact, it’s as easy as it could reasonably be. You copy it over, you wire it up to Steam, if it’s a non-Linux game you set it up with Proton or whatever else you want to use to run it, bam. You can now run it in Steam just as easily as a normal Steam game (usually.) If you want something similar to cloud saves you can even set up SyncThing for that.
But all of that is a lot of work, and after all that you still don’t have automatic updates, and some games won’t run this way for one reason or another even though they’ll run if you own them (usually, I assume, because of Steam Deck specific tweaks or installed that are only used when you’re running them on the Deck via the normal method.) Some of this you can work around but it’s even more hoops.
Whereas if you own a game it’s just push a button and play. They made legitimately owning a game more convenient than piracy, and they did it without relying on DRM or anything that restricts or annoys legitimate users at all - even if a game has a DRM-free GOG version, owning it on Steam will still make it easier to play on the Steam Deck.
It’s built on Linux. Specifically Arch Linux. So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy. Not even if they wanted to.
So what? Orbis (the PlayStation OS) is built on FreeBSD, but there’s still anti piracy on the PS5.
They could have:
Believe me, if they wanted to try, they could have.
actually making linux usable with the deck controls was probably more work than locking the users out of the desktop mode even
You got me there. Doing stuff like that on other platforms like the Switch totally prevented piracy, so I suppose it’s a good thing they didn’t do it on a system that thousands of devs know down to the kernel without having to reverse engineer.
You said prevent, not eliminate. There’s tens of thousands of ways to prevent piracy. They are not infallible, but they are preventatives.
There is nothing on this earth that will eliminate piracy.
Where would you like to move the goalposts now?
Anytime you’re reduced to arguing semantics, it’s not even an argument worth engaging in. So I’m not going to bother responding further to you.
That’s not moving goalposts, you’re just arguing semantics. People generally think of eliminate when they say prevent in this kind of conversation…
If anything if they went “prevention” and not “eliminate” like in your sense…it would be even dumber because it would just make the steamdeck a more restrictive x86-processor computer compared to the systems people were already comparing it to up until it’s release
Imagine how it would’ve gone down if people were saying “Of course you can do that, it’s a PC” if people responded with “Yeah, except it’s 10x harder to do things you could normally do on PC”. They wanted it to be close to how a PC is, it was part of the advertising campaign.
Nintendo is incompetent.
PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.
Sure there is, they could have not built it on Arch Linux
They could have not given you root access and forced you to install your own OS for it to manage things that aren’t on Steam. They could have locked the bootloader and refused to install anything they didn’t sign.
Neither would violate the license provided they made the source available.
Tell me you don’t know how to administer Linux without telling me you don’t know how to administer Linux.
I don’t administer Linux, I use Linux. Unless you’re conflating being an end user with being an administrator, in which case I would say that’s a rather pretentious way to put it. Nobody walks around saying they administer Windows because they have a laptop. It sounds stupid.
Android is built on linux yet it is increasingly locked down and many phones are extremely difficult to get root access on.
So Valve could have followed the phone ecosystem path and pushed as much of the feature set as proprietary code as possible (binary blob drivers, proton proprietary instead of bsd), replaced pacman with a valve controlled package manager & repos, setup selinux to give users no power to do anything and made the deck only able to secure boot steamOS signed by Valve. Technical users may be able to jail break such a device but the majority would not be inclined to.
Valve’s wisdom here is in realizing that the majority are going to buy their games anyway but if you don’t lock the device down then most of the technical users will also buy most of their games whereas if you have to go out of your way to jail break a device to install something fun then that device basically becomes a piracy only device from that point on.
And instead of doubling-down in denial, they embraced the openness.